Plants
Microbes give plants a way to make ‘meaty’ nutrients
Enzymes from animals helped a test plant make two nutrients essential for a balanced diet. Normally, those nutrients would only be found in meat.
By Skyler Ware
Plants
More Stories in Plants
- Plants
Explainer: How to identify tree species in the winter
No leaves to be found? Then buds, bark and branches might help you ID what tree you see.
- Climate
Trees may be even bigger climate heroes than we thought
These plants absorb methane, a potent greenhouse gas, in addition to carbon dioxide. Methane’s uptake is likely thanks to microbes living in tree bark.
- Plants
Catapulting pollen helps this flower beat out its rivals
With explosive blasts of pollen, male Hypenia macrantha flowers remove rival pollen from hummingbird beaks before the birds reach female flowers.
- Plants
Are plants intelligent? It seems to depend on how you define it
Plants can do a lot of the same things animals do: communicate, learn — even remember. Now scientists want to know if that means they’re intelligent.
- Plants
Insect-eating plants digest faster with a fungal friend
Insects stuck in sundews’ sticky goo break down faster when the plants host an enzyme-making fungus.
- Climate
An ancient log shows how burying wood can fight climate change
A blanket of clay soil helped the wood hold onto the carbon it had absorbed — for thousands of years.
- Plants
Explainer: How a seed grows into a plant
Plants use carbon from the air to make food and build shoots, roots and more. They adapt and respond to their environments in many incredible ways.
- Plants
Many flowers and ferns lure in ants as bodyguards
With an offer of a nectar meal, ferns and flowering plants have been bribing ants to fend off predatory insects — since before the rise of T. rex.
- Plants
This squid-like ‘fairy lantern’ plant is new to science
A newly named species of fairy lantern — a parasitic plant — sports tentacles and grows among leaf litter and rotten logs in Malaysian rainforests.
